Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Zap! You have just been zinged by the Zombie
Drug and sent to The
Zone. No, I’m not talking about the ephemeral “zone” attained by trained
athletes during intense competition, or the “zoned out” condition of Zonker Harris and friends
in the world of Doonesbury, or the zagging of steroid-enhanced superstars
attempting to avoid the next tackler or the next drug test. I’m talking about
the ultimate football experience: the north end zone at Bryan-Denny Stadium,
home of Alabama football.

The Zone, as it’s called, is a spectacular facility and
edifice to the Alabama football fans, replete with numerous amenities
guaranteed to convince you that an end zone box seat really is the best way to
watch a game. Personally, I prefer the President’s Box on the 50-yard line, but
not everyone gets a chance at that view of the Iron Bowl.

But for me, The Zone will not be remembered for its
contribution to the football gods, but for something entirely different: the
art and practice of decision making.

The story begins on a nondescript day when I left a
reception at The Zone and returned to meet with members of my staff in the
Office of Research to discuss the usual droll topics of the day. When quizzed
yet again by them as to why certain decisions by a fellow administrator had not
been made and why I was negligent in not pushing hard for their resolution as
was my usual style, I had a moment of inspiration and true innovation. I
blurted out: “They’ve gone to the Zombie Zone!”

Amidst tittering laughter and a general rolling of the eyes,
I was quizzed yet again as to what the heck was the Zombie Zone. Making it up
as I went along, I replied, “you know, the place where decisions are neither
alive nor dead.” Sensing that I wasn’t going to be responsive in a practical
manner, the staff groaned in disbelief and accepted the adjournment of the
meeting.

But adjournment didn’t mean the end of the story – not with
my ever intrepid and creative staff. For countless hours over lunch and in
furtive meetings, they toiled away to add flesh and bone to the Zombie Zone.
And the final product was the graphic displayed at the beginning of the
article.

Glowing red, orange, and yellow to reflect the flames of
McDowell’s Inferno, the pathways to the Policy Pit and the Zombie Zone of
Decision Hell were entered through the following trap doors:

Assertive
inaction

Creative
continuum

Analysis
addiction

Pro-active
pondering

Stalemated
studying

Essential
evaluation

Revved
up revisions

Decision
dungeon

Redundant
revisions

Non-essential
nuances

Passive
persuasion

And, of course, all the pathways leading to the Zombie Zone
pointed inward with none leading out. Given more time and innovative energy,
I’m sure the Alabama Office of Research could have created the ultimate theory
of decision-making. And here you thought football – namely, The Zone – had
nothing to do with academics or innovation!

Over time, the Zombie Zone became a great source of
amusement as research office staffers routinely whispered and secretly referred
to “the zone,” often producing many strange and puzzled looks by those not in
the know who wondered why The Zone had anything to do with the topic at hand.

Humor aside, the act of decision-making is all important to
every facet of our lives, but especially to those facets that concern starting
up or investing in a new company, or trying a new experiment, or becoming an
entrepreneur, or making that intuitive leap to a new innovation. It’s so easy
to arrive at “decision junction” only to pick one of the trap doors leading to
the Zombie Zone or Policy Pit.

No matter how hard we try, there will never be the perfect
process, enough time, or the complete set of facts and data required to always
achieve the perfect decision. Failure to decide is also a choice and often the
wrong one. And like the infamous “writer’s block,” it can lead to stagnation. For
myself, I prefer making the decision to move from A to B and then adapting by
mid-course corrections as new information emerges. Making the wrong decision is
not something to be feared or a certain path to the other Hell. It’s a part of
doing business.

Decision, decisions! Who needs them? We all do. And as the
football addicts among us await the start of a new season in late August and
the inevitable crowning of the Crimson Tide as the national champions, take a
few minutes to step free of the Zombie Zone with its entrapments and re-enter
the real world where business decisions must be made in a timely manner free of
false encumbrances and useless agonizing. And when you’re done, take a deep
breath and shout with the rest of us: Roll Tide!

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Innovation! It’s the dominant pathway to more jobs, economic
prosperity, and wealth generation for Americans, but it’s also a hard
taskmaster requiring a steady pipeline of inquiring and prepared minds, ready
and able to create the next wave of innovation at the frontier.

And it’s not a happening guaranteed to occur spontaneously
and of its own accord at a level sufficient to optimally drive the growth of
American industry. It takes a sustained societal investment. It takes a trained
and educated workforce. It takes scientists, engineers, inventors, innovators,
entrepreneurs, risk takers, venture capitalists, English majors, writers, and a
host of other inspired people. And at the core, it takes teachers!

Where would we all be in our lives without those dedicated
teachers who worked tirelessly for long hours and rose to the challenge of
shaping and molding us into a better person?

I will never forget the endless and terrifying drumming of
the rules of grammar into me by my tenth grade English teacher, Mrs. Highfill.
Or the excitement and explosiveness of chemistry as taught by Rachel Roberts.
Or the competent and efficient unveiling of physics by Mrs. Dockery. Or the
incomparable Flossie Shaw’s algebra class. Or Betty Welch, Mrs. Holder, Louise
Hunter, and the many other teachers too numerous to name who “made my day” as a
teenager. I remember them all! They were my friends and my mentors.

So when did these paragons of society and the ultimate force
behind innovation suddenly become the enemy? Who decided that we as a nation
should redefine one of the fundamental strengths of America and turn the best
of us into THEM? And why would anyone be so stupid?

Unfortunately, it’s the oldest and most often repeated mistake
of humankindIt’s the game
of power and control played by a few over the many under the guise of
principled dogma and founded on the delusion that exploitation and plunder of
the many can be sustained indefinitely. But as the Rev.
Al Sharpton is fond of saying, “A lot of things were acceptable – until we
stopped accepting it.”

So what does it mean for America when we turn the principle
of a balanced budget, one that we all agree with, into a plan for austerity,
low taxes, and little or no government in order to eliminate those who would
disagree with us or vote against us in an election – whether members of a teacher’s
union, those who believe in gay rights and gay marriage, those who believe in
equal pay for equal work, or even those who believe in the rights of gun
owners?

For the teaching profession, it means lower pay, fewer
benefits, and doing more with less. It means using teachers until they have
nothing else to give and then casting them aside at retirement. After all, why
should tax payers front the bill for the retirement of public teachers goes the
argument? It’s the same old self-centered and greedy storyline of “you’re on
your own, buddy!” And who among us truly believes that the best and brightest
will become teachers under these conditions?

But it’s not just the teachers themselves that will be
impacted by the draconian austerity measures being served up to America these
days. It’s the entire infrastructure of our modern education system that will
be put at risk including the following potential outcomes:

Larger
number of students per teacher.

No
fine arts, music, or other extra-curricular activities – except football
in Texas.

Fewer
essential supplies and older, out-of-date, well-used textbooks.

Reduced
maintenance and repair or upgrade of physical facilities.

Less
usage of expensive high technology tools and information technology.

Lack
of exposure to cutting edge knowledge.

And the list goes on. Is this the right formula for teaching
the next generation of innovators?

Even worse, it’s not just the impact of budget austerity
that should concern us, but also austerity in both the content and the manner
in which teachers teach. On the curriculum side of the equation, the extremists
and right-wing conservatives want a scripted and dogmatic curriculum that
conforms to their rigid notions of truth, even if contrary to the facts. It’s a
cookie cutter version of education guaranteed to produce obesity of the brain
with fat and lazy minds, not the lean and agile minds with the necessary
analytic skills required for innovation. Conservatism as a doctrine and practice
is fine, if that’s what one comes to believe and accept, but it can’t be
force-fed to our young unless we want stultification as the end result.

Lest you think counterfactual and anti-science based
curricula are a thing of the past, let’s review a few recent events. In Texas,
we have the State Board of Education continuing in its attempt to insert intelligent
design into our textbooks as a scientific theory equal to the theory of
evolution. How is that going to work for young Texans who want to pursue
innovations in the fields of health and bio-technology where evolution reigns
supreme and knowledge of the nanoscale and molecular biology are essential?

What about women’s health and, most especially, how we deal
with sex education in our classrooms? Come to a Texas classroom and learn all
about abstinence as the singular solution to practicing safe sex and the
failure of condoms as a prophylactic. That’s right! Condoms don’t work in
Texas. Thank goodness for Gail
Collins who has uncovered some of the more bizarre and antiquated notions about
sex being taught as truth in Texas.

And it’s not just in Texas! In my birth state of North Carolina,
the Legislature is considering a bill
to limit planning for the expected rise of the ocean levels due to global
warming. Maybe, we should also outlaw gravity while we’re at it! It might help
with our nation’s obesity problem. Folks, ignorance
is the bane of innovation.

And how would you like being a well-educated teacher
standing in front of a classroom of eager minds knowing full well that learning
is as much a process of discovery and independent thinking as it is a process
of knowledge accumulation. Good luck to you on that one and woe unto any
teacher who challenges pupils to think and analyze. You’ll be on your own if
modern conservatism has its way!

Making teachers the enemy is nothing more than a cynical
ploy by a few who want to exploit fear and ignorance of the facts and use
sloganeering – “union busting” being a prime example and “anti-abortion”
another – to pursue their own selfish and personal goals. Don’t be fooled by
any of this nonsense. Teachers are not the enemy! Instead, they should be
nurtured and respected for they are the very heart and soul of our future as a
nation of innovators.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

America in
decline – it’s the message of our time broadcast daily by cable news pundits
and re-enforced by a dysfunctional Congress, a polarized electorate, an
unstable economy, and a barrage of negative campaign ads courtesy of Citizens
United. And in the midst of the continuing sluggish rate of job growth and
a recent drop in market indices, it was with some trepidation that I decided to
turn off the television, prop up my feet, and singularly bore myself to death
for a day or two by reading the ultimate soporific tome:The
Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States, compliments
of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Economic Council, January
2012.

Commissioned
by the COMPETES
Reauthorization Act of 2010 and reviewed by a brand new USDoC Innovation
Advisory Board (IAC) of fifteen members, I can’t say that the lengthy
report lightened my spirits, but it nonetheless serves as a well-written and
reasonably quick read of our Nation’s status at the 10,000 to 30,000-foot level
and the steps being taken to “startup America.” Sadly, I’m likely to be one of
the few people ever to read the document.

The
essential theme or premise of the report from my perspective – it’s up to you
to check me out by also reading the report – is as follows: government must
invest for the “public good” in the three pillars of innovation in order to
cover under-investment by the private sector and to generate competitive
strength as a nation through the resulting growth of private-sector jobs – especially in manufacturing – while
“ensuring that both established firms and entrepreneurs in the private sector
have the best possible environment in which to innovate.”The three pillars of innovation are
research, education, and infrastructure.

Each
pillar of innovation along with the state of manufacturing is dissected in a
separate chapter based on a network concept of the innovation ecosystem as displayed
in the following figure which is reproduced from the report.

While each
chapter and the report as a whole provide an excellent review of underlying
statistics and data – often painting a rather gloomy picture for the current
trend lines, the issue of evaluation metrics once again arises with both proxy
metrics, such as the number of patents and research publications, and economic
accounting, such as the size of the labor force and number of jobs, serving as
the primary measures.

Beginning
with research and noting that innovation is driven by the R&D process, the
report emphasizes that government investment over many decades was undertaken
without commercial applications in mind and for the “public good” – especially
for basic research since it usually has no direct profit incentive to drive
investment by the private sector. My own personal “grade” for the research
pillar is an A-minus headed for a B-plus as I’ve documented in other articles.

The education
pillar deserves a grade of “B” from my perspective, not as bad as often claimed
by media pundits, but headed down due to a failure of government support for
education and a switch to state-assisted instead of state-supported, not to
mention the anti-government stand of the Tea Party movement and its negative
effects on education. The DoC report focuses specifically on the STEM issue as
an exemplar of the bigger story in education. While an adequate survey of the
situation, I personally continue to be unconvinced that the so-called shortfall
of STEM workers is of the magnitude portrayed by many. I’m happy to be
convinced otherwise, but hard data seems to point to a different conclusion as
I’ve described elsewhere.

In terms
of the infrastructure pillar, everyone agrees that America gets a grade of
D-minus! Although the information technology sector which includes fiber, cable
modems, satellites, cell phone towers, and the like is doing better than other
sectors, we are nonetheless behind the curve on wireless, cloud computing, and
access to open innovation – to name a few critical areas. And what about the
need for a “smart grid” for the transmission of electricity and a movement
toward clean energy systems? If anything, America’s grid systems are in
significant decay with bridges, sewer, and water systems getting an “F” from me
and others. As noted by the report, “our society has affirmed repeatedly that
we would like all of our citizens to have access to certain technologies”
meaning principally telephone, electricity, roadways, and now high-speed
Internet, but that could be changing in the current political climate.

Without
investment by both the government and the private sector in the three pillars
of innovation, America is in trouble since “Innovation is the key driver of
competitiveness, wage and job growth, and long term economic growth.” And that
means we need a healthy manufacturing sector propelled by a new thrust in
advanced manufacturing innovations including advanced technology products. The
Obama Administration’s Advanced
Manufacturing Partnership is a good start in that direction.

But
competitiveness defined as a “set of institutions, policies, and factors that
determine level of productivity of a country” requires much from us. At the
national level, we must balance protecting intellectual property and its
transfer against the competing element of accelerating commercialization into
the marketplace. The America
Invents Act of 2011 is a step forward and new experiment for the nation in
that regard. At the local and regional level, research universities must serve
as the anchor for co-located industry, start-up companies, business incubators,
entrepreneurs in residence, “proof-of-concept” centers with funding, innovation
centers, and communities of innovation all connected and bound through
public-private partnerships collaborating in a regional innovation cluster.

Nothing on
the global scale required for America to compete happens overnight and it can take
years to recognize a return on the investment, even if the return for
government is in the form of the “public good.” But government must invest and
the planning laid out by the Department of Commerce report is a very positive
step. The question of the day for us is simple: do we have the moxie to get
this done?

About Me

Keith McDowell is a scientist and research administrator widely known for his research in theoretical chemical physics on quantum dissipative systems and for his leadership as the vice chancellor for research and technology transfer at The University of Texas System as well as vice president for research at The University of Texas at Arlington and The University of Alabama. Dr. McDowell is a graduate of Wake Forest University and Harvard University. An Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and awardee of the University of Texas Chancellor's Award for Teaching, Dr. McDowell is currently a retired professor of chemistry from The University of Texas at Arlington residing in Austin, Texas. Keith is an expert genealogist with several books and manuscripts to his credit (www.mcdowellgenealogy.com) and an avid mountaineer with over 500 ascents spanning forty years.

New eBook by McDowell!

Innovation! It’s the cure-all for an ailing America. So says conventional wisdom. And the engine of innovation is the American university – the wellspring of new knowledge to fill the technology and commercialization pipeline. But universities and their faculty are under attack as being poor stewards of what some perceive as a new mission. Who is right? What is the real story? Go Forth and Innovate! reveals a personal perspective on the inner workings of the modern research university and its role in the innovation ecosystem.